Couriermail.com.au is Queensland's biggest locally-based site - and the Nielsen figures prove it

YOU are reading Queensland's biggest locally-based news website. Nielsen figures for September show couriermail.com.au's Queensland audience is almost double our nearest competitor.

According to Nielsen Market Intelligence, couriermail.com.au was read on 906,000 Queensland screens - compared to just 529,000 for Fairfax media's local news site.

Further, the average person spent 25 minutes with our content (compared to under 10 minutes for the Fairfax site) and our readers came back an average of 8.37 times (compared to 5.53 for our nearest competitor).

In page hits, too, the results for couriermail.com.au were impressive: the website served more than 31 million pages in September (not counting auto-refreshes), compared to just 11.6 million for our competitor.

Internal "real-time" analysis also shows the gap: with between five and 10 times as many readers on couriermail.com.au stories at any given moment than on the Fairfax version of the story.

For example, Fairfax's October 29 lead story on taxpayers footing the legal bill for stood-down Transport Director-General Michael Caltabiano had 43 readers when a couriermail.com.au story at the same time had more than 200.

However on one measure - a national audience, which, advertisers should note, includes readers outside Queensland - Fairfax's site recorded 1.055 million people while couriermail.com.au recorded 1.012 million.

News Queensland digital editor Neale Maynard thanked couriermail.com.au's loyal readers - and reminded them that the newsroom that powered the site was by a massive margin the largest in the state.

"We break the vast majority of stories that matter to Queenslanders - and that's a promise to our readers we have kept every single day since The Courier-Mail began more than a century ago," Mr Maynard said.

"The only promise our competitors can make is that they also cover those stories; later."